Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard

Most of the article talks about characters, but in my experience, they are the easy part. Unlike Japanese and its 15 ways to pronounce 生, Chinese is "easy" by comparison, with most characters mapping only to one sound.

The death blow is the tones. For the Anglo-centric, not only are you unable to "read out" the characters like you can Latin-based scripts (let alone the "cursive script"), but if the tones are off, you'll accidentally call your mother (妈 mā) a horse (马 mǎ). Japanese is a lot more straightforward in this regard.

On its own, each challenge is surmountable. English has words that are diffcult to pronounce and memorize too (see Ghoti [0] and "read/lead" [1]).

But when the whole language is like that, it becomes a lot harder.

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[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghoti

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Showerthoughts/comments/221b2t/read...

Their language is so difficult that I don't understand how they can function as a nation let alone be a serious competitor for the first place scientifically. Does the language work as an intellectual practice?

Long read, but very nice! I like the style, e.g:

> Whereas modern Mandarin is merely perversely hard, classical Chinese is deliberately impossible. Here's a secret that sinologists won't tell you: A passage in classical Chinese can be understood only if you already know what the passage says in the first place.

> But it is true that there are too many of them, and most of them were designed either by committee or by linguists, or -- even worse -- by a committee of linguists.

> A Spanish person learning Portuguese is comparable to a violinist taking up the viola, whereas an American learning Chinese is more like a rock guitarist trying to learn to play an elaborate 30-stop three-manual pipe organ.

I have always been attracted to languages with a different alphabet, but Chinese always just seemed completely out of my league. I don't know if that is correct, but Japanese seemed easier to speak (like I could repeat words or small sentences and people would understand), whereas it seems very difficult to merely say something that a Chinese native will understand.